Standards (1890-1920)
The American Curriculum
The struggle to control the high school curriculum is best described by Herbert Kliebard in The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (Routledge, 1987).
Kliebard documents the pendulum-like swing of curricular reform in the twentieth century. He begins with the NEA Committee of Ten in 1893 and ends with the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Kliebard shows how curricular reform efforts were contests between competing classes and interest groups, and he delineates the "main ideological positions of the various interest groups and the way they balanced as well as contradicted one another."
Two educational committees and the reports they produced are often used as markers in understanding the struggle to control the high school curriculum. These committees are the Committee of Ten and the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, more commonly known by its report, The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.
